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Old 2nd January 2011
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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The line between CISC/RISC is quite obscured these days, nobody really uses those terms, but for at least AMD64 and probably modern x86's it's a mixture of CISC and RISC.

Performance is also hard to justify, very few non-x86 architectures are even made anymore.. at least in the desktop/workstation setting, and the ones that do lack the features of commodity hardware.

Still, if I had to buy anything it would be ARM or MIPS based, the future of ARM-based workstations is becoming more likely with the recent designs put out by the company, and they support things like multicore, out-of-order execution, higher clock rates, fabrication sizes.

Sadly a newer "MIPS" or "ARM" platform wouldn't be immediately supported by OpenBSD, as there generally the basis of other commercial products.. containing a wide variety of other hardware.

I'm not sure if I'd buy a recent SPARC now that it's owned by Oracle, but as you said, something from a auction site might be worth looking into.. quite a lot of them use SCSI drives though, only UltraSPARC/sparc64 have PCI/PCIe buses, which is needed if you want to add a PCI IDE/SATA controller.

I hope that more exotic hardware becomes popular, I can see both ARM and MIPS ending up in ATX form factor with PC-compatible peripheral support eventually, AFAIK the Chinese Loongson chips had developments boards in that form factor.
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